This invention concerns radiation therapy, usually as post operative or intra operative treatment to eradicate malignancies or other types of tissue. Specifically the invention concerns verification of dose delivered in a radiation treatment procedure, and can include real-time feedback to a controller, verification of treatment and modification of a treatment plan and of the radiation delivered in real time as needed based on monitored dose at one or more locations.
Radiation therapy, including with x-ray radiation, is used for several purposes on human beings, from treatment of minor skin cancers to post-operative treatment after resection of a tumor. In brachytherapy a radiation source is placed inside the patient for localization of the radiation treatment. In IMRT, intensity modulated radiation therapy, beams of radiation are directed from a series of external positions toward an internal target of the patient, and fingers shape the beam into beamlets for each treatment position, thus concentrating the desired radiation dose essentially at the target with the goal of delivering only harmless doses of radiation along the series of different paths. The IMRT radiation would better be characterized as “position modulated”, or modulated as to a series of different angles of attack for the beams of radiation.
Although these and other types of radiation therapy have been improved in recent years and have become more specifically targeted and localized, achieving improvements in dose accuracy and better avoiding excessive dose to other tissue not to be irradiated, these radiation therapy techniques have not achieved localized verification of delivered dose or real-time correction of treatment and have not approached the accuracy, localization and safety of the current invention described below.